I started with this:
command *
But it doesn't work when the directory is empty; the * wildcard becomes a literal "*" character. So I switched to this:
for i in *; do
...
done
which works, but again, not if the directory is empty. I resorted to using ls:
for i in `ls -A`
but of course, then file names with spaces in them get split. I tried tacking on the -Q switch:
for i in `ls -AQ`
which causes the names to still be split, only with a quote character at the beginning and ending of the name. Am I missing something obvious here, or is this harder than it ought it be?
Assuming you only want to do something to files, the simple solution is to test if $i is a file:
for i in *
do
if test -f "$i"
then
echo "Doing somthing to $i"
fi
done
You should really always make such tests, because you almost certainly don't want to treat files and directories in the same way. Note the quotes around the "$i" which prevent problems with filenames containing spaces.
find
could be what you want.
find . | while read file; do
# do something with $file
done
Or maybe like this:
find . -exec <command> {} \;
If you do not want the search to include subdirectories you might need to add a combination of -type f
and -maxdepth 1
to the find command. See the find man page for details.